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Monday, 19 December 2016

Opening New Frontiers (Organiser)

By M D Nalapat | International

Donald Trump clearly sees that it
is not Russia but China that poses the biggest threat to the US
supremacy, and that Beijing is the revisionist power.

The increasing probability of a war in East Asia involving the US, South
Korea and Japan against North Korea and China is growing. Within five
to six years, the Kim Jong Un regime’s arsenal of nuclear weapons and
delivery systems will reach the stage when severe damage is feasible
against the three allies, Seoul, Tokyo and Washington.

Thereafter,
secure in its home base, the Kim regime is likely to pursue a
destabilising policy of proliferating nuclear weapons and associated
delivery systems to Wahabbi states and groups that by then will be in a
state of low intensity conflict with major democratic states, including
India and the US. The only western leader who has understood the
centrality of the need to ensure that the Kim Jong Un regime be stopped —
through persuasion if possible and through force if not — is Donald
Trump. Given the rising likelihood of a war centering around the Korean
peninsula, the logic of a reachout to Moscow and Taipei is impeccable.
Were Taipei to take the side of Beijing in the conflict, the security of
Japan and South Korea would be severely compromised. And if Russia
could be prised away from backing China in a future East Asia war, that
would make victory for the Seoul-Tokyo-Washington alliance certain.
During the 1950s Korean war, it was Moscow’s assistance that enabled Mao
Zedong to hold US troops at bay, that and the policy of fighting with
both hands tied that was adopted by President Harry Truman in opposition
to the counsel of General Douglas MacArthur, who was removed from
command rather than allowed to unify Korea by force of arms through
fuller use of US military assets than had been permitted by the
haberdasher-President of the United States. Those looking beyond the
superficial will be able to discern a clear pattern in the foreign
policy thinking of Donald Trump: should an East Asia conflict be
inevitable, reaching out to Taipei and Moscow becomes essential, and
this is what is being attempted even before the 45th President of the
United States takes office on January 20, 2017.

While forecasting the
victory of Donald Trump in the US Presidential elections of November 8,
2016 it was obvious that the billionaire represented a welcome and
needed break from decades of Cold War-anchored foreign policy. Focussed
as this was on Moscow, such an Atlanticist focus suited both the
European as well as the US eastern coast elites, both of whom continued
to frame policy on the basis of a Euro-centred globe. Barack Obama saw
the absurdity in this, but lacked either the courage or the political
capital to seriously challenge an orthodoxy that had nourished both
Wahabbism as well as the authoritarian challenge to US global primacy
represented by the Second Superpower, China. Although Obama separated
some aspects of his administration's foreign policy during his second
term, towards the close, what was perceived to be the inevitable
succession of Hillary Rodham Clinton to the White House made the present
US administration revert back to the Euro-centred “Weltanschauung”
(World View) embraced by both the Bushes and the Clintons. With his
business acumen and ear to ground realities, it took Donald Trump to
challenge the Atlanticist orthodoxy in foreign policy, in the process
generating waves of hysterical commentary on the “dangers” of a Trump
Presidency. In actual fact, only the foreign policy now being enunciated
action after action, statement after statement (or tweet after tweet)
by President-elect of the United States Donald John Trump has the
potential to delink the US from the disasters that the Euro-centred Cold
Warrior foreign policy of the State Department and the eastern seaboard
policy elites have caused.

The collapse of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics in 1991 created an opportunity to integrate Moscow
into a collaborative world order. However, this would have meant the
ceding of paramountcy to Russia in Europe, an outcome that is anathema
to Atlanticists.

Encouraged by France and Germany, neither of whom
wished to integrate Russia into Europe, the Clinton administration made
use of mafias close to Boris Yeltsin in an effort at ensuring the
“pastoralisation” of Russia i.e. converting that country into a supplier
of agrarian and industrial raw materials, lacking an independent
technological base.

The attempt at the forcible conversion of a tech giant into a pygmy created a backlash against the Atlantic Alliance (including
NATO) within those policymaking groups within the Russian Federation
that were not under the control of individual or several NATO
member-states, and in Vladimir Putin, the country found a leader with
the brainpower and determination needed to ensure that Moscow emerge out
of its post-1991 chaos into the front rank of global powers, a task
that has been achieved despite opposition from NATO member-states led by
the US. Should Russia not be Enemy Number One, the very foundations of
the classic Euro-centred foreign policy will dissolve, hence the fury of
this establishment at the efforts of Donald Trump to effect a genuine
reset with post-Soviet Russia, a country that has the same Christian
majority as does the US, and which faces the same elevated threat of
Wahabbi extremism as do the US and India.

The 45th President of the
United States has anchored his policies not in the past but in the
future, when China may seize global primacy away from the US, especially
under the leadership of “Han Nationalist” Xi Jinping.

Through the
One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative, Xi Jinping is seeking to convert
China into the backbone of global commerce, using infrastructure to link
Asia and Europe together, much the same way as the Roman Empire did two
millenia ago. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is less a
part of OBOR than it is a means to ensure that Chinese military assets
can reach into the heartland of India (Punjab and Rajasthan) in a
decisive manner and within days of the launching of a war against India
together with Pakistan. Given the neglect of indigenous weapons systems
by successive governments in the Lutyens Zone, in both aircraft as well
as in armour, China poses a military challenge to India that can only be
mitigated should the US move into India's corner in a far more decisive
way than was the case during the 1962 border hostilities between the
two neighbours. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy in India is as much Cold
War-oriented as is the case with the European counterparts they so
admire, and thus far, not even the logistics agreement with the US (LSA)
has been operationalised, much less than those dealing with
Communications Security (CISMOA) and with Basic Exchange (BECA). Whether
it be the heightened military threat posed by the CPEC or the need to
ensure that the Kim Jong Un regime does not reach the stage of
irremediable lethality in its nuclear preparations, or indeed the
broader conflict involving Wahabbi groups, close cooperation between the
US and India is essential for both sides, but despite this, both
bureaucracies are slowing down and attempting to sabotage such a
military alignment of the world's two biggest democracies.

Donald
Trump is not an amalgam of North America and Europe the way Hillary
Clinton or the (US) eastern foreign policy establishment is. The
businessperson turned leader is very much a child of his country and the
present. He sees clearly that it is not Russia but China that poses the
biggest threat to US primacy, and that it is Beijing rather than Moscow
that is overturning a global order that has maintained US primacy since
the close of the 1939-45 war. Aware that the US has only a narrow
window of five or six years before it will be too late to challenge
China effectively in theatres such as East Asia and the South China sea,
seeing for himself the imminent threat that North Korea poses to the US
and its allies in Asia, the newly elected President of the United
States is seeking to cobble together a geopolitical order that can
reverse the decades of decline that the Euro-centred, Russia-phobic,
China-boosting policies of the Clintons, the Bushes and the McCains have
created. Unlike his predecessor, whose courage falls far short of his
objectives, Donald Trump has been candid on the need to effect
foundational change in US foreign policy.

Small wonder that Euro-ized
elites such as House Speaker Paul Ryan are seeking to slow down or to
halt altogether the shift away from the toxic legacy of the past.
However, once sworn in as President of the United States, it is likely
that Trump will deploy his formidable communications skills to warn the
population that it is not Russia but China that represents the biggest
threat to continued US global primacy. Taiwan is crucial to success in a
future East Asia war, and Trump has therefore broken with the
Kissingerian doctrine of pandering to the Communist Party of China
through accepting its eventual supremacy over Taiwan. The incoming
President has publicly said that he no longer intends to follow an East
Asian diplomacy that is geared not to the core interests of Washington
but of Beijing. In such a context, the most important global partner
will be India, but the question is whether Lutyens Delhi will permit a
reconfiguration of defense policy so as to ensure a partnership with the
US that would checkmate the China-Pakistan alliance and its ongoing
program to create infrastructure that would permit the Peoples
Liberation Army to intervene in a Pakistan versus India conflict not
just across the Himalayas but prospectively into Punjab and Rajasthan as
well through the tank and artillery highway that is the CPEC Donald
Trump, with his focus on core US interests and on actual rather than
fancied conditions, can be expected to continue to work to ensure that
the accomodation given to Beijing since Nixon-Kissinger (and which
enabled a new superpower to emerge) get discontinued. His choices for
Secretary of State, Defense Secretary and National Security Advisor
reflect the next US President's awareness that war may be needed in the
Korean peninsula if Kim Jong Un is to be prevented from posing an
existential threat to the US, Japan and South Korea. The outreach to
Tsai Ing-wen ( who incidentally is a close friend of India) in Taiwan
reflects such hard-nosed calculation, as does his reaching out to
Vladimir Putin in an effort to ensure Moscow’s neutrality in a future
East Asia war. The role of India will be crucial in the emerging
security scenario. Donald Trump will move with more despatch against
Beijing the surer he is of a partnership with Delhi. Prime Minister Modi
needs to move beyond the Lutyens Zone in identifying strategies needed
to maximise benefit for India in the emerging geopolitics of a world
that will soon witness a Trump Presidency. What is needed is to ensure
that the economy of India move into double digit growth so that there
will be the means to ensure that the defense sector be adequately
provisioned. What is needed is to work out strategies designed to
prevent any erosion in security as a consequence of the CPEC. What
is needed is to position India as a reliable and effective partner in
the War on Terror as well as in ensuring the security of democracies
in Asia. President-elect Donald Trump has made his stand clear. In the
months ahead, especially on India, Russia and China. It is to be
expected that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will in the months ahead move
beyond the Cold War paradigm that the Lutyens Zone has for so long
espoused, including in an early start to direct conversations between
the leaders of the two biggest democracies in the world.

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About Prof. M. D. Nalapat

Prof. Madhav Das Nalapat (aka MD Nalapat or Monu Nalapat), holds the UNESCO Peace Chair and is Director of the Department of Geopolitics at Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India. The former Coordinating Editor of the Times of India, he writes extensively on security, policy and international affairs. Prof. Nalapat has no formal role in government, although he is said to influence policy at the highest levels. @MD_Nalapat

MD Nalapat's anthology 'Indutva' (1999)

In 1999, Har-Anand published Indutva an anthology of MD Nalapat's 1990s columns from the Times of India. The individual columns are posted here, in 1998 and 1999 of the blog archive, though the exact dates of publication are uncertain.